When Warner Brothers released the seven-minute cartoon Canary Row in 1950, it’s a good bet no one realized they’d created an important tool in the study of human communication and cognition.
By examining these videotapes closely–at key points, frame by frame–McNeill has found that the gestures we spontaneously make in conversation are full of meaning. They are not “body language,” unconnected with speech. They are not ethnic hangovers. They are not emotional outlets for overexcited storytellers. They are not a crutch for the inarticulate–nor a simple translation of the spoken word. McNeill contends, and his tapes show, that gestures and speech jointly form a single mode of expression stemming from the same underlying mental process. Together they are windows on the mind.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Spontaneous conversational gestures are vastly different from spoken language. Gestures are often images of reality–when you tell how Sylvester spots Tweety through a pair of binoculars, you might also peer through O-shaped hands in front of your eyes. Gestures are idiosyncratic–you might make the “binoculars” with your whole hand, and I might use just index finger and thumb, but neither of us is “wrong” in the way we would be if we said, “Binoculars Tweety ribbet Sylvester spies.” Gestures don’t combine into larger units the way words do; while language is analytic–putting the scene together out of pieces (“Sylvester,” “Tweety,” “binoculars,” “through”)–gestures are synthetic. One motion tells all.
On the other hand, under certain circumstances hand motions can be a language. The most familiar example is American Sign Language (ASL), but there are others, like the sign language used by women of the Warlpiri people in north central Australia, and sign languages invented by deaf children of parents who don’t know any sign language (the subject of research by McNeill’s colleague in psychology, Susan Goldin-Meadow).
“He’s an absolutely wonderful, inspiring professor,” says Justine Cassell, who was a graduate student under McNeill in the 1989-90 school year and who now teaches French, linguistics, and psychology at Penn State. “He is exceptional in his ability to create a nonhierarchical intellectual atmosphere.” She was the one who nominated him for the Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for graduate teaching, which he received last spring.
In this information-processing (IP) view, the way people think and speak can be described in flow charts made up of simple inputs, simple operations, and simple outputs, repeated as often as necessary. No one step stands out as more important than any other; as in a computer, there are simply “bits” of information that can be arranged in a variety of ways, depending on the use to which they’re being put. This idea has appealed to philosophers and psychologists ever since ancient Greece, and it is even more seductive today, now that difficult calculations and games such as chess have been reduced by computer to enormously complex chains of on-off switches.
McNeill’s reply is as scientific as they come: what he sees on the tapes can be explained better his way than the IP way. One factor is the timing of gestures. Regardless of what language is being spoken, the word and the gesture always occur together. If they began as a single hybrid unit, this makes sense; if the IP view is true, it has to explain how and (especially) why gesture and speech are synchronized. In fact, McNeill points out, the speaker prepares her gesture (usually by raising hand and arm) a syllable or two before actually making the word-gesture utterance. If the gesture were the last thing computed, as in the simple six-step breakdown suggested above, then it would be quite odd that in actual speech it comes first–being prepared even before the relevant word comes out.
